Stances In Battling and Training Defence

When you battle in the dome you need to choose an ability to use for every
move. Many people just use the ability berserk attack much too often. You should
not use berserk attack unless your opponent is frozen or you are sure you are
going to get through more icons than they are. Many species have a good species
attack. It is usually the last "species ability" listed from the drop down menu
when you select an ability. People should be using this species attack, many
of which do 6 icons of damage instead of using berserk attack. Here is an example.
If you and your opponent both attack with a dark battle duck which does 8 icons,
and 1 uses berserk and the other uses a species attack, the one using the species
attack will win. Let us look at the damage assuming both have the same strength
boost and use a strength boost multiplier of 2.

Now let's take an objective look at Training Defence that we hope you will
find useful.

People are always asking if they should train defence. A yes or no answer won't
suffice for this question. It depends on many different factors which we will
try and cover here.

It has not been long since we found out what training defence actually does.
Defence boosts are identical to strength boosts and go up to 700. Every time
your defence boost goes up, you will block more damage per icon using the same
weapon. It's now a given that defence is worthwhile and is good to have.

So now that you know the basics, here are the facts to consider when deciding
if you should train defence or not. The 2 biggest problems with training your
pet are the Neopoints and the time it takes. It's more expensive and time consuming
now to train your pet to very high stats because there is no Training School
for high stat pets and the maximum hit points you can get from any Negg/Snegg
is 3 hp. Kitchen Quest, the Lab Ray and Neggs/Sneggs are about the only training
options you can control. You will get a few Faerie quests along the way and
maybe a strength stat from Turmaculus on occasion.

Decide what your objectives are and then make your decision whether you should
train defence and how high you should train defence. HP and strength are still
more important than defence, meaning that if two people train a total of 1200
stat points and 1 pet has str=600, hp=600, def=0 and the other has str=400,
hp=400, def=400 the person with the 600 stats should win every time in 2 player
battles and be able to get more wins against a given opponent in 1 player battles.
However, if the person with the 400 stats is battling other people with 400
hp and str stats they have a distinct advantage. If you want a super pet with
very high hp, you might only want to train defence until you consider it too
expensive and time consuming to continue training defence at the training schools.
You can still get some defence stats from other things such as kitchen quest.
On the other hand, if you like 2 player battling, having a good defence can
help tremendously when battling other pets with similar str & hp until you reach
a level where you start facing weapons such as the Sword of Skardsen, Ghostkersword,
Faerie Slingshot, Attack Pea, Seasonal Attack Pea and Super Attack Pea. At that
point, defence doesn't matter as much, but can still help.

At present there are some good low and midrange defence weapons that are defence
boost dependent, such as the Air Faerie Crown, Mask of Coltzan, and others even
including the cheap Leaf Shield. Once you start facing the high icon attack
weapons mentioned above you'll find yourself using weapons that are not totally
defence boost dependent. At this level you will be using weapons that typically
block all of a single icon and a little of another such as Greater Staff of
the Earth Faerie, Shield of Pion Troect, Golden Pirate Amulet, Battle Plunger,
Jhudora's Wand, Winged Scarab because it only lets through a fixed amount of
damage even though it doesn't block all, and reflectors. Ghostkershield falls
in the middle because it does block all dark but some of several other icons.
Let us look at an example. If you use a Shield of Pion Troect against an Attack
Pea, you will block it all regardless of your defence boost because the Attack
Pea attacks 24 earth icons and a Shield of Pion Troect blocks all earth. On
the other hand, if you use a Shield of Pion Troect against a Seasonal Attack
Pea you will block a little more damage because it actually blocks all earth
and 2 light. So if you have a 700 defence boost you will block all earth and
30 damage from the light icons, 2 icons x 15, which is the defence boost multiplier
for 700 defence. On the other hand, if your defence boost is 0, you will block
no damage from the light icons. For every defence boost you have above 0 up
to 700, you will block more damage from the light icons, even though the weapon
"defends 2 icons". So if you have the 85, 125, 200 or 250 etc. defence boost,
you will block more damage from the light icons the higher the boost. It's also
important to keep in mind that Neopets may come out with better defence weapons
that are similar to thye Ghostkershield, making defence boost more important
to high level battlers. The Ghostkershield blocks all dark, 3 air, 5 earth,
3 light and 5 physical, so it is possible to defend an additional 240 hp damage,
16x15=240, if you have the 700 defence boost vs. a 0 defence boost.

So decide what your objectives are and go from there. There is no right or
wrong answer to the question of whether you should train defence; it really
depends on your objectives. Good luck and have fun!

Shadowflame: SnowfallA blizzard
had struck not long after she had set out to scale Terror Mountain, leaving Happy
Valley behind her in a haze of white flakes and wind. Her name was Shadowflame Darkhunter...